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1.1 UNINSTALL OTHER VENDOR’S DISPLAY DRIVER
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If driver for another vendor’s display card is installed on your Linux system, you
must uninstall it before installing S3 Graphics Linux driver. Otherwise the installed
S3G Linux driver may not work correctly.

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1.2 PREPARING YOUR SYSTEM
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S3G Linux driver includes a kernel driver module “s3g.ko”; therefore, you need
to make sure your Linux kernel is set up to support module loading firstly.

The S3 Graphics kernel module has a kernel interface layer that must be
compiled specifically for each kernel. S3 Graphics Linux driver package includes
the source code for this kernel interface layer, as well as precompiled kernel modules
for some of the popular Linux distributions.

If the pre-compiled kernel module for your system is not included in the install
package then you need the kernel header files and the necessary kernel source
code installed for the compilation to work. On most Linux distributions, this means
that you will need to locate and install the kernel development package.

To show which kernel is currently running on your Linux, run

$uname -r

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1.3 OpenSUSE 11 SETUP
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Since OpenSuSE 11 doesn’t include kernel config files that are needed for S3G kernel
module compilation, you need to generate the config files with the following commands:

Some S3 Graphics Chrome4xx/5xx cards have two video output ports and can support two
monitors simultaniously. If your “xorg.conf” file is configured as single adaptor
single monitor mode but you connect two monitors to the Chrome4xx/5xx card, then the
two monitors will show the same graphics contents simultaniously (DualView).

You can also modify “xorg.conf” file to setup a single adapter multiple monitor
(SAMM) configuration with either individual desktop on each monitor (Xinerama Off),
or spanning desktop on two monitors (Xinerama On). A sample “xorg.conf” file for
SAMM configuration (xorg.conf.samm) is included in “S3G_InstallPkg” directory.

S3 Graphics Chrome4xx/5xx card can also work with other vendor’s graphics card to
support multiple adapter multiple monitor (MAMM) configuration. You can modify
“xorg.conf” file to setup a multiple adapter multiple monitor (MAMM) configuration
with either individual desktop (Xinerama Off) or spanning desktop (Xinerama On).
A sample “xorg.conf” file for MAMM configuration (xorg.conf.mamm) is included in
“S3G_InstallPkg” directory.

S3G linux driver also implemented a new video API called VDPAU. This API is used by the latest
SVN version MPlayer for video acceleration. The following commands are used to playback
H.264, VC-1, WMV9 and MEPG-2 clips respectively: